My name is Hayou Mitiori, and my life is not one many people would aspire for. I am 57 years old with bad ankles, 5 foot 7, and very bald except for what little grey hair still grows just above my ears. I've been married for 34 years and unhappy for close to 31 of them. I have 2 kids who are grown adults, Shima and Ryuu, and neither one likes to talk to me. I grew up in rural Japan and served in the military reserves for 12 years, before being discharged without a pension because my intoxicated officer got in a scuffle with me, and then successfully blamed it on me to his superiors to avoid losing his military career. Many other misfortunes in my life were not the result of me being an alcoholic or lacking commitment towards my dreams, even though I did drink and didn't have many aspirations. Instead, my misfortunes in life were mostly caused by me making poor decisions or having bad luck, and then being too stubborn to de-commit from them by believing that eventually, it would work out the way I initially expected.
A 'misguided optimist' would be the best way to put it.
Of all the bad decisions I've made in life, perhaps my biggest mistake was devoting my career to the 'Kyoto Sun', a small-scale newspaper operating out of Kyoto that prided itself on covering stories more successful papers didn't care to give coverage. They needed a photographer who needed a job, and I had a camera and needed a job. For 23 years I worked for the newspaper which oversaw several corporate buyouts, sizable layoffs, and repeated pay cuts. I never tried to switch to a different newspaper, because for the longest time I believed that after every change and major setback, things would finally turn around for the better.
They never did.
After a while, my stubbornness to sticking to my mistakes transitioned into resignation that these bad things happen inevitably, and that it was pointless to de-commit from them because it would just cause more bad things to happen. I could have changed my life many times in recent years, but whenever those opportunities presented themselves, I saw them as a choice between 'crappy present' vs 'even worse future'. So for the past several years I committed to the bad constants in my life, such as my marriage and my job. The alternative would always be somehow worse then the current state of things. I didn't 'know' it would be worse, I only knew that based on my past life experiences they would by all likelihood be worse then the way things were presently.
This didn't make me a 'pessimist' though. Pessimists believe that the worst thing will happen in every scenario and only ever see the negative qualities in things. Instead, I am better classified as a 'defeatist', someone who expects to fail or is excessively ready to accept failure.
I could see the good in society and the good intentions people had for others, I just accepted that good fortune would never happen to me. That my attempts to go out of my way to acquire good fortune would only leave me worse off then before.
On August 18, 2018 I was given an assignment by my boss to photograph overcrowded housing situations in Shanghai. I was the only person on the staff who spoke any Chinese, which I learned while in the army reserves almost 20 years ago, so I was always the selected to go to China whenever a potential story there came up. It would only be a 2 day assignment where I would fly out, get pictures of what I needed, and fly back as soon as I could. In the spare time I had, I would try to meet up with an old associate of mine who was a semi-successful broker of historical items, Hua Ghenka. I had some old items I inherited from my father that could be of value, and Hua was the guy who would give me the best price for them.
Thanks to the explosion of wealth in China, numerous millionaires and billionaires have clamored to the top of Chinese society and seek to outdo each other in whatever way they could. Some became politicians, others built skyscrapers, and some used their newfound wealth to purchase whatever historical item they could get their hands on. Japanese items made just before WWII were almost the most valuable of all, because many items from this time period were destroyed following the bombing of Japan in WWII. Also because deep-seeded hatred between China and Japan prevented the flow of cultural items between the countries only until very recently, creating an entire new market of items for the Chinese ultra-wealthy to claim for themselves in order to one-up each other.
My father, before he died, happened to get his hands on two 1933 Kwanon cameras, the first successful camera produced by Japan by the company that would eventually became Canon. One of them still functioned and was in very good condition, and the other was a complete mess but still retained its original components. 2 pieces of valuable Pre-WW2 Japanese history like these would fetch some good money in China, though I could never know for sure how much. After incredible amounts of nagging from my wife, who always pestered me to sell of my fathers possessions for whatever money we could, I finally agreed to bring them to Hua and see what I could get for them. If all went well, it would be a nice and easy assignment that would also allow me to put a little more money in my pocket when I returned home.
Not much went according to plan after I landed in Shanghai. In fact, nothing in the world could have prepared me for what would happen in Shanghai.